Kim eBook

Chapter I

O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to judgment Day,
Be gentle when ‘the heathen’ pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!

Buddha at Kamakura.

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the
gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the
old Ajaib-Gher — the Wonder House, as the natives
call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah,
that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the
Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always
first of the conqueror’s loot.

There was some justification for Kim — he had
kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions
— since the English held the Punjab and Kim
was English. Though he was burned black as any
native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference,
and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song;
though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with
the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white —
a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste
woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and
pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the
square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries
that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but
his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel’s
family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young
colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment.
He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and
Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without
him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore,
and O’Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down
the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby.
Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried
to catch him, but O’Hara drifted away, till
he came across the woman who took opium and learned
the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in
India. His estate at death consisted of three
papers — one he called his ’ne varietur’
because those words were written below his signature
thereon, and another his ‘clearance-certificate’.
The third was Kim’s birth-certificate.
Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious
opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man.
On no account was Kim to part with them, for they
belonged to a great piece of magic — such magic
as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in
the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher — the Magic
House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would,
he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s
horn would be exalted between pillars — monstrous
pillars — of beauty and strength. The Colonel
himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest
Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim —
little Kim that should have been better off than his
father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose
God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to
Kim, if they had not forgotten O’Hara —
poor O’Hara that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore
line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken
rush chair on the veranda. So it came about after
his death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and
birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which
she strung round Kim’s neck.